You haven’t run for a while and when you finally do a few laps, your lungs are burning and your heart races. Or perhaps it’s been a long time between gym sessions and the morning after a workout every muscle in your body aches – even ones you never knew you had.
If we don’t use our muscles regularly, they get weaker and don’t work as well, which is why it’s hard going for that run or lifting those dumbbells after lifting nothing heavier than the TV remote for a while. Our brain is also a muscle and if we don’t keep using it, at some point we may start to lose our brain power as well.
Cognition, or how we think, how fast we think and our memory are controlled by our brain, and these functions start to deteriorate if we don’t exercise our brain every day.
Dementia is a term for several diseases that affect memory and thinking.
